Happy birthday, H.P. Lovecraft, for 20th August! This year, my present is an audio reading of “A Descent to Avernus” (1928) by H.P. Lovecraft.

Download: At the Internet Archive.

The text describing his descent into the underworld was extracted from a long travelogue titled “Observations on Several Parts of America”, written in 1928. The text has here been lightly abridged for audio production and to ensure wide distribution. With a small addition from a letter written to Zelia Bishop, 28th July 1928, describing the same trip. I’ve also let his “Observations” run on a little after the visit to the caverns, to encompass his return to the city of Providence immediately afterwards.

Note that Lovecraft uses the term “buried aeras”, which does not indicate historical eras. The word aeras is ancient Greek in origin, and indicates a sort of ethereal breath or tremulous atmosphere blown out into the air. Probably believed by the Greeks to be breathed by divine beings. In Lovecraft’s use it then poetically indicates a mighty breath trapped or frozen in rock deep beneath the surface of the earth. The same word is also used in his famous story “The Call of Cthulhu”…

… those first men formed the cult around small idols which the Great Ones shewed them; idols brought in dim aeras from dark stars.

There “dim aeras” would seem to indicate the scientific method of cosmic transportation, implying a dimly-lit atmospheric cloud which surrounded the Great Old Ones when they were traversing the depths of outer space. This would then seem to relate to the idea they could ‘sail the star-winds’ without the need of spacecraft, as hinted at slightly later in “The Call of Cthulhu”. Such enveloping seems especially likely when we hear in the story that they were not made of normal matter…

The [Great Old Ones] had shape — for did not this star-fashioned image prove it? — but that shape was not made of matter. When the stars were right, They could plunge from world to world through the sky; but when the stars were wrong, They could not live. But although They no longer lived, They would never really die. They all lay in stone houses in Their great city of R’lyeh, preserved by the spells of mighty Cthulhu for a glorious resurrection when the stars and the earth might once more be ready for Them.